Building internals, whether residential or commercial are not designed for easy installation or change. Interior reconfiguration typically requires the demolition of most internal partitions (such as walls, doors, and ceilings) and a complete redesign and rebuild. This wastes materials, time, and money. The expense of doing so often prohibits changes and upgrades that would otherwise provide significant economic, functional and social benefit to a building.
For example, fixtures, such as pipes, ductwork, floors, walls, ceilings, and the like require significant labor, time, and expense to install and change. Walls, floors, and ceilings are currently not designed or constructed to allow them to be easily moved, changed or replaced. One exception is some types of modular walls that can be used to create cubicles, cubicle environments, or movable partitions, for example, for dividing up an open or multi-use space. Cubicles or cubicle environments refer to offices or rooms that are created using cubicle or modular walls or dividers placed on an open floor where the walls of the office and/or room are formed using the cubicle dividers. Often these dividers are not the full height of a wall (i.e., they do not reach the ceiling) and thus offer little to no sound insulation due to their construction including the materials used. They also require significant time and cost to rearrange and connecting electrical power and other services to them can also be expensive.
Some floor systems also exist that offer the ability to manually install and re-route HVAC (heating, ventilation, and/or air conditioning), power, and/or data, but the floors themselves are not easily reconfigured or replaced once installed. Dropped ceilings (such as those that use acoustic tiles found in many office buildings) are also available to hide HVAC, power, etc., but are not reconfigurable once installed—they merely cover and allow access to the pre-existing fixtures and systems. One cannot change the configuration of the room and easily reroute the HVAC to maintain a healthy environment—the ductwork and other HVAC equipment must be moved and readjusted manually.
Thus, it is currently difficult to really know and track the internal configuration of a building once the building has been constructed. Floor plans for most constructed buildings capture the internal configuration at a particular point in time, but do not reflect changes or updates made to the walls and/or the building equipment. In many cases the floor plans and internal design documents are simply not kept updated. Also, the position and orientation of pipes, ductwork, electrical wiring, and other building fixtures may not be known accurately. There are many changes made during construction and renovation that are not documented because the changes occur on the fly during the construction process. This means that over time, the interior configuration of a building becomes less and less knowable to the owner, occupants, and the building, and often the floor plans and other design documents become severely outdated. This is true for both existing fixed and modular fixtures. This in turn leads to a complex and expensive ‘discovery’ process during renovations and maintenance and further deters upgrades and changes from being undertaken.
In addition, even if configuration information for a building is available, it is not usually kept in a format that can be shared with entities other than the ones responsible for the construction design or implementation, whether human or electronic.